“Tell them, Ed,” Tanya said. She put her hands on his shoulders and shoved him toward the table. Still no stabbing. I was impressed. Edward grunted at Tanya to quit bugging him, then reached into his black coat and pulled out a cloth. He set it down on the table and gently unrolled it for all of us to see. The smart Hunters leaned in.

It was a fuzzy little lump of pointy flesh. “That’s from the spider?” Lee asked, instinctively moving back from the table. I remembered Ed chopping the end of the limb off and his cryptic words about it not being real. The orc pointed at the thing, as if to say, see?

“What? I don’t get it?” Cody said.

“Ed says it’s fake. It ain’t real and stuff,” Tanya explained.

Curious, Lee overcame his dislike of giant spiders and came back over to squint at the piece of leg. “Hmmm…You know, there is something weird. I’m no biologist…” Albert Lee knew more about giant spiders than the rest of us, since they had been his initial exposure to the world of monsters, had killed a bunch of his friends, and nearly cost him his life. “The hair is wrong. This is like fur. The ones I’ve killed had bristles. And the bottom is wrong. This is like a spike. The other ones had a sort of pad.”

Ed shook his head in the negative and grunted angrily. A knife materialized in his hand. I knew from experience he usually had a dozen of those stashed. He pointed the tip at the leg and made a poking motion. I tried to see what he was getting at. There was a bunch of sand that I hadn’t noticed in the cloth before, but other than that, it looked like the end of a spider leg, only it was about the size of a hot dog. Then Ed took the knife and began mashing the leg violently with the flat of the blade.

It crumbled into sand.

“What the hell? Can I see that?” Cody took the knife from Edward and scooped up some of the dirt. Half of the sample still looked like the leg, black, hairy, and distinct, but at the edge of where Ed had smashed it, it simply turned into brown sand. “I’ll be damned.”

“The magic on it has worn off. He showed it to me first,” Tanya explained proudly.

“Fake…Moosh,” Ed explained. He looked around at the humans, seemingly embarrassed to have said anything. By Edward’s standards of communication that had been a doctoral dissertation.

“Good work, Ed,” I told him.

The brainiacs were intrigued by this new development. “Z, is this what the soil in that area looked like?” Paxton asked.

It was hard to tell. It all looked like sand to me, and much of it had been covered in snow. “Pretty close, I guess.”